Forgotten Shadows
You grew up in the Redmond Barrens of Seattle. It wasn’t exactly the best place in the world to grow up in, but to you its home. You know the mean streets better than most and probably don’t have much desire to hang around. It’s run down, broken, polluted, and generally a hive of humanities cast-offs. Just surviving can be an exercise in futility some days.
Yet you’ve managed to find a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak existence. Running the shadows can be a dangerous job, but compared to living on the streets of Redmond it’s a walk in the park. You’ve learned some skills, maybe even gotten some cheap cyberware at the Body Mall, and now you’re ready to hit the shadows. You’ll have to gather a team to rely on – a solo runner is as good as dead. You’ve put out some feelers and you think you’ve managed to find a few like-minded souls to join your cause. You even have a job lined up with Father O’Malley down at the First Salvation Church. It’s not much, but it’s a start on the path to a better life.The future lured us with promises of a better tomorrow and a global village where everyone was treated equally and fairly. There would be no hunger, no disease, and no homeless. Everyone would live in a Utopia of technology and peace. Obviously this rose-colored version of the future didn’t even come close to happening.
Instead the corporations rule a global economy that crushes the mass of humanity beneath its heels. The forgotten and sinless are discarded to the shadows, left to their own devices as they try to eek a living doing whatever they can to survive. Even magic didn’t offer an answer – the corporations usurped magic as just another product, churning out mass produced foci and charms for an eager public.
Yet humanity endured in the shadows, forgotten but not dead. Even as the corps forgot about the outskirts of ever city the shadows grew and embraced their own. Entire communities of the SINless sprang up and began to fight back against the violence, the corporate apathy, the massive reach of the gangs and Triads. And they produced you, as well.
You grew up in the Redmond Barrens of Seattle, a broken shell of a once vibrant industrial district. The government gave up on the place long ago, but its residents didn’t. You and your family (if you were fortunate enough to have one) did what you could to survive. You scrounged around, you dreamed of a better future and you tried to avoid the iron grip of the corporations.
It’s time to stop hiding and time to start fighting back. The communities that helped you to survive need assets. They need help to even survive, help that doesn’t mind breaking the laws of a self-adsorbed corporate court. And sometimes the very corporations that forgot you need deniable assets to do their dirty work. You’ve realized one important fact: the only way out of the Barrens is through the forgotten shadows. You are a shadowrunner.
